Seeking Feedback on GreatAlbum site plans

Hi Drupal Boston, Alumni & Genealogy groups. I was pretty active in these groups about 10 years ago. Been out of it for a while, but jumping back in now as I prepare to build & launch a site that's been my dream for 20 years!

About GreatAlbum

Two of the most popular hobbies genealogy and family photography/scrapbooking. Genealogy is primarily focused on finding new family members, and documenting/proving key life events, like birth, death, marriage, etc. Photography can amass a ton of family photos, but no good way to organize them. Scrapbooking collects representative photos/artifacts, but generally organizes them in static pages. But there’s a gap. What’s missing that should bring these two together are the stories about the people, places, events and related multimedia.

GreatAlbum will be a storytelling platform. It draws upon the passions for genealogy, photography, and scrapbooking, and takes them to a much higher level in the art of telling stories about the lives of friends, families and their shared experiences. Right now, there are four offerings envisioned:

Legacy Album – Tell the story of a lifetime – when someone is reaching a major milestone, like a big birthday or death

Alumni Album – Remember good times & catch up – for high school, college, work & other groups that want to reminisce the old times and keep up with each other’s lives

Social Inbox – Organize your social media – for anyone who wants to consolidate their social media posts and organize into life events

Family Album – It’s like LinkedIn for families - Capture & share the stories of individuals & families in your family tree

Seeking Feedback

I have considered both the Organic Groups (OG) and Groups modules for the site, but since being able to post content into multiple groups is critical, like this post has done here on GDO, I have to stay with OG, right?

I really would like to go with Drupal 8 for the site, but I see that OG 8.x is only at 1.0-alpha2 with 200, whereas OG 7.x is at 2.10 with 22000 sites! It seems like it's too risky to build on D8, and I should go with D7. Your thoughts? What will I be missing most not launching on D8?

So you know of any other sites out there with similar functionality to the offerings mentioned above?

I'm building a prototype site now to mock up as much of the functionality as I can, with limited technical expertise. I'm then planning to hire (or "partner with") someone who could build v1 of the site, based on the prototype with additional functionality that we define on top of the prototype. I'm planning to post a job for this, but wanted to throw it out there, in case someone is interested in discussing this with me.